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Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony | 
 enlarge | Author: Jonathan Lear
Publisher: Other Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
Buy New: $18.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 177068
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 1590511433
Dewey Decimal Number: 616
EAN: 9781590511435
ASIN: 1590511433
Publication Date: August 17, 2003
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Product Description
This book argues that, properly understood, irony plays a crucial role in therapeutic action. However, this insight has been difficult to grasp because the concept of irony itself has been distorted, covered over. It is regularly confused with sarcasm; it is often mistakenly assumed that if one is speaking ironically, one must mean the opposite of what one says, that one must be feigning ignorance, that irony and earnestness cannot go together. All of these assumptions are false. So part of the therapeutic action of this book is conceptual therapy: we need to recover a vibrant sense of irony. This book, then, is not merely about the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis; it is an enactment of conceptual therapy. It is thus written as an invitation to clinicians--psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists--to renew their own engagement with the fundamental concepts of their pracatice.
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| Customer Reviews:
 First draft of a great book November 21, 2005
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Lear's book is a continuation of Freud's "metapsychology," offering new ways to conceptualize some of what happens in psychoanalysis. His starting point is one which would seem obvious but is in fact rare in psychoanalytic writings (something which he comments on), namely, to "psychoanalyze" certain trends in psychoanalytic writing, that is, to speculate on the hidden motives, avoidances, and self-deceptions these trends might be covering. In doing so, he offers some brilliant insights, especially about subjectivity vs. "objectivity" and about transference. But Lear's book is an "easy read" because the writing is loose and casual. I found the scene-setting and run-up to his intellectual climaxes both rushed and drawn-out, the way you come to inspired thoughts during an all-nighter just before deadline, and afterwards you wish you had had the time to organize your whole essay around them from the start. Lear addresses himself very explicitly to the community of psychoanalysts (which at moments can be offputting to the uninitiated), and while his style is a refreshing change from the professional, impersonal prose of most analytic monographs, he also seems to address his peers as though they were laypersons. Furthermore, most of the book is organized as a commentary on a very influential essay by Hans Loewald, but by the end Loewald has disappeared, replaced by Heidegger and Kierkegaard. (Furthermore, Lear lets us know that he had weekly conversations--not, apparently, an analysis--with Loewald for several years, but never shares anything from those conversations with the reader. Very exasperating, and not just for Loewald fans.) I know I've spent more time in this review on the style than the substance, but as Lear asserts more than once in his book, the how of what is said is often more important than the what. I'll leave it to Lear to put his style on the couch. I'm inclined to excuse him: he's a practising analyst as well as a philosophy professor; he can't very well take a six- or twelve-month sabatical at a humanities center to make this the book it could have been. And that's a pity.
 Lear Takes On Postmodernism December 28, 2003
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
In this typically witty and delightful essay, Lear opens his mind to ironies of the psychoanalytic process, and in doing so finds reason to be suspicious of postmodern narratives of "intersubjectivity." This is a sort of return to Freud, or to more sympathetic readings of Freud, than we are used to these days. But Lear's take is postmodern, even if the postmodernists bug him, and this easy-to-read book will inspire new thoughts about old ideas across ideological spectrums.
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